Disgaea 5:
Alliance of Vengeance is the latest in
Nippon Ichi's venerable strategy RPG series. The
first entry on the PS4, it feels like the
developers wanted to make an impact for their
debut on a new console. Sadly, despite a
brilliant, entertaining, and fresh story, Disgaea
5 is a major step backwards in terms of
gameplay. Bad level design, coupled with some odd
design choices prevent the game from reaching
excellence. Features from previous entries that
are strangely absent only serve to further expose
these weaknesses. It's certainly not a terrible
game, as it has intricately deep systems and
optional content to explore, but there's also too
much tedium involved for the game to really shine.
Sadly, players will be interrupted by too much
tedium to fully enjoy the best parts of the game.

The story, at
least, is fantastic, and leaves very little to
complain about. Taking place in a universe with
many demon-filled netherworlds, the story begins
with an extremely powerful overlord, Void Dark,
waging war on all other overlords. It's in this
struggle that players are introduced to Seraphina,
an overlord in a hopeless battle against part of
Void Dark's army. She is saved by a seemingly very
powerful demon called Killia, who shows up in the
middle of the battle eating curry before swiftly
dispatching all enemies. Somewhat unwillingly
following Seraphina along, the two begin a quest
for revenge against Void Dark. From there they
meet other demons and overlords looking to take
down Void Dark and form a rag-tag rebel army.

The plot
includes tons of goofiness and never takes itself
too seriously, and yet still manages to be
poignant. The characters in the rebel army grow
and become closer as the game moves along, so that
when the story reaches its satisfying conclusion
the characters feel like they have a real bond.
They never feel like a bunch of stereotypical
anime tropes thrown together for laughs. The
localization does a fantastic job with the story
as well, giving each character lots of
personality, even stylizing some after famous
wrestlers, but not in a way that only those who
know the reference would get. It's a fantastically
entertaining story that stays for the game's long,
eighty-plus hour length.

You'll
need plenty of curry breaks to
make it through this game.

What helps
keeps things on track is how the story flows. In
previous Disgaea games, all story
sequences happened before and after battles, as
well as at the start and end of chapters. In
Disgaea 5, only crucial plot-related
dialogue occurs before and after battle. Non
plot-focused dialogue gets relegated to optional
conversations that players can view while in the
home base. This allows goofy side conversations
their own space that doesn't disrupt the game's
flow, making major plot scenes feel more focused
and interesting. It's a small change, but one that
does great things for the game, and hopefully will
be used in future iterations.

Disgaea 5,
at its core, is a typical Japanese-styled strategy
RPG playing similarly to games like Final
Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre.
What sets it apart is the way its mechanics allow
the player to "cheat" or simply overpower
characters and gear for those who wish to put the
effort in to do so. There is even a cheat shop
that players can unlock, which allows for
manipulation of various aspects of the game. For
those who wish to ignore these aspects, much of Disgaea
5 is typical of a deep strategy RPG. There
are various classes players can create characters
as, with more unlocked by getting characters to
certain ranks in existing classes. In addition to
class-based abilities, characters also learn
skills from using the weapons in the game. Though
these skill are independent of any class, each
class has an inherent affinity for certain
weapons. This allows for a lot of customization
for the player's party.

In addition to
player created characters, story characters get
their own set of skills unique of any class. This
makes these characters feel distinctive so that
they are worth using in addition to player
creations. The problem comes as the story
characters learn their overlord skills. These
once-per-battle skills are available when a
character's meter fills up due to them or their
allies taking damage. The skills on many of the
story characters are absurdly powerful, to the
point where later battles in the game feel
balanced particularly for their use. This can take
a lot of fun, choice, and strategy out of a
player's hands, turning these battles into an
exercise in using these overlord powers most
effectively, with the rest of the party being only
minor players in the battle. Trying to beat the
game without their use would take a massive amount
of grinding, which is problematic unless a player
specifically is overleveling characters. Disgaea
5 already requires a massive amount of
grinding to complete.

What makes this
most disappointing is that the developers have
injected new strategic elements into battle, which
are a nice touch before the super abilities get
out of hand. Previous Disgaea games would
give enemies weaknesses and strengths against the
three elemental attack types, which were important
to keep aware of. In Disgaea 5, this has
been expanded to include a fourth kind of magic
and weapon type weaknesses. Now players will not
only have to consider the elemental type of the
attack they want to use, but also if the enemy is
strong or weak against the weapon they're using.
To help with these new elements, characters can
now equip a sub-weapon and a sub-class. This
allows characters to have a bigger set of skills,
and a backup weapon in case all the enemies are
strong against their primary weapon. These
elements feel a bit underdeveloped, since they
don't actually do anything outside of giving
characters a larger skill pool, but they are
welcome with the new strength/weakness system
nonetheless. It's just a shame they get undermined
later in the game by the overlord skills.

Overlord
powers such as Seraphina's are
absurdly powerful.

The game's one
big flaw, sadly, is level design. The vast
majority of stages in Disgaea 5 are
unremarkable, with very little in the way of
interesting terrain to consider. Past Disgaea
games have heavily used an element called
geo-panels. These color-coded panels would have
various effects on units depending on the type of
block on the color. These include increasing the
power of enemies and causing instant death to any
character ending their turn on the designated
panels. These made many stages very difficult to
navigate, and provided depth to battles beyond
simply taking out the enemy team. While geo-panels
are in Disgaea 5, the instances where they
require any thought or can't easily be ignored are
exceptionally rare. Stages in some netherworlds
have new effects seemingly to replace this
feature, such as one where mushrooms will spawn
each turn causing various effects. These are rare
and more of an afterthought, though.

This flaw rears
its head the most in one of the series' biggest
feature: the item world. The item world allows
players to go through a series of randomly
generated battles to increase the power of weapons
and other items. New to Disgaea 5, the
player can decide what type of upgrade is most
relevant by choosing different paths. This is a
useful feature, though it is counterbalanced by
another strange design choice. In previous games,
players could simply get to the exit for any stage
in the item and still gain a level for the item
despite doing so. Now, no bonus is given for any
stage unless the player defeats all enemies
therein. This makes the item world especially
tedious when one takes into account the level
design issue. Some fun stages do occasionally pop
up in the item world with a crazy variety of
geo-panels, but they are few and far between. Rare
events such as invasions by powerful enemies,
another classic element of the series, also seem
somewhat less frequent, and would have helped
spice things up.

From an audio/visual
front the game doesn't have much to complain
about. Sprites and locations look a bit nicer than
on PS3, and the game uses lots of interactions and
animations between characters' sprites in addition
to the talking portraits regularly used in most
JRPGs. Animations for spells and attacks are
interesting and fun, but can be quickly skipped
after the first viewing if the player desires.
Nothing here exactly pushes the PS4 to its limits,
but everything is smooth and crisp. Music fits
battles well, and some vocal themes are included
as well that help mix things up. Not all the tunes
are particularly memorable, but it's all enjoyable
and many of the tunes will stick with players,
particularly the fun theme that plays in the home
base between battles. The series isn't really
known for its music, but it has been improving
over the years and Disgaea 5 continues
this trend.

When it isn't being
a frustrating game, Disgaea 5 can be a lot
of fun. Once things slow down to grind, however,
the story may be the only thing that will keep
players going. All the pieces are here for a
fantastic Disgaea game, but thanks to some
odd design choices and the awful level design, it
never comes together. The long length of the game
only exacerbates these problems as well,
especially considering the extra grinding that is
required just to make it through the main story.
There's certainly hope for the future of the
series, especially giving the great story Disgaea
5 contains. However, those looking for the
series to make a big splash on current-gen
consoles will be sorely disappointed. These aren't
the prinnies you're looking for, move along.